


Personal Development

by seanchaidh



Category: Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies)
Genre: Academy Era, M/M, Nipple Clamps
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-15
Updated: 2013-07-15
Packaged: 2017-12-20 06:04:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,086
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/883804
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/seanchaidh/pseuds/seanchaidh
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When Leonard finally gave into the idea of joining Starfleet, the only thing that followed him from Georgia were the clamps stored in the deepest part of his satchel.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Personal Development

**Author's Note:**

> I swear this came from a prompt from the Buckleup_meme from ages ago, but I can't seem to find it now. Nevertheless, it was a prompt about Bones and nipple clamps. Who am I to resist? Thanks to Sternel and Canis_takahari for the support. :)

Sometime during the first few months at the Academy, when he wasn’t drowning in reading and trying to avoid strangling the majority of his classmates, Leonard began to do a slow post mortem on the wreckage that was his marriage. A part of him really wanted to understand what had happened, as a way of making sure he never repeated the lessons learned; the other part of him wanted to suffer and agonize over the mistakes. Luckily, the latter half was getting shouted down more and more often.

The real problem, he began to realize, was that there was never a watershed moment where he could place a firm “before” and “after” that made any logical sense. It wasn’t Joanna’s birth, but it had definitely passed by the time Leonard’s father fell ill. Sometimes, he felt like he’d fallen asleep at the controls and woken up somewhere else entirely, with a stranger who looked like Jocelyn in his bed. An apt way to describe the vague second half of the marriage, as he muddled through the maelstrom of conflicting moments: tenderness then anger then the cold shoulder.

One thing he did remember noticing was how the sex had gotten rougher. Maybe it was a symptom of the make-up sex that they had every other week when they never really resolved the latest argument, but it wasn't anything like the way they'd made love when they were first married. If anything, it factored into the downward spiral of their relationship as they progressed into having angry sex. There were more bites and scratches, which Leonard hadn’t minded all that much as long as it was done in areas that could be covered when they were both working.

In the middle of one session that seemed bent on mutually-assured destruction, she’d twisted his nipples in a vicious grip. He’d let out a shout of pain and surprise before snapping at her – literally – in response. Luckily for them that night, Joanna was staying at her grandmother’s while Leonard and Jocelyn tried to patch things up; otherwise, a concerned five-year-old would’ve been knocking at their door. But as the initial shock faded, he realized that he was harder than before. The sting felt good, and it would fade into a pleasant tenderness he’d feel days later whenever something happened to brush against his chest.

This was a revelation he didn’t immediately pursue. Months later, he was finally out of the house and in a rental room downtown where he didn't need to have a lease. He hated staying in the bare room at night, when he was used to a warm house, a loving daughter, and even Jocelyn's tight-lipped silences. He'd never fully understood the meaning of rock-bottom, but there he was. What friends he had were professional or shared with Jocelyn; he hated his work and felt he needed to start something afresh.

Things kept on pointing toward Starfleet, and yet Leonard refused to go.

He took to walking the streets on the evenings when he wasn't meeting with the lawyer, making awkward conversation with his mother – she said she wasn't not angry about his dad but he knows she's lying – or spending cherished moments with Joanna. There were coffee shops where he'd sit unobserved, or bars that he'd haunt. He knew people were watching him, trying to make eye contact in the hopes of something more, but he didn't have anything in him to invest in human contact.

He barely had interest in his own hand.

One evening, his nocturnal wanderings found him in the vicinity of a retro-looking sex store, with the windows covered despite liberalized sex laws. It looked harmless and promising, and on a whim, Leonard found himself going inside. He'd once considered going to a store like this while he was trying to patch together the marriage, but he'd never found the time. Now he wandered down the aisles, alternating between amusement, disgust and interest at the vagaries of human sexual predilections.

The best thing about the store was the way he wasn't bothered by the staff, who lingered at the counter in the off-chance that a customer needed help, and Leonard wasn't interested in hearing suggestions about anything at the moment. Near the rear, however, he found a display of nipple toys that went from the titillating to the more severe, and Leonard found himself testing each one on the webbing between his thumb and index finger. Some were light and flimsy, but there was one that produced a thrill when it clamped down on his skin.

He went straight to the counter and bought it.

It took another week to actually try them. He came back to his room one night after spending the day consulting with his lawyer and contemplating just quitting his life. He felt antsy and on edge, and lying back on his bed, dick in hand, wasn't helping his nerves. Leonard lay there, staring at the featureless ceiling and finding nothing in his tired brain for inspiration. He was going through the motions, literally, and without success.

He paused, remembering the clamps abandoned in a paper bag inside his suitcase. Suddenly, they were the only things he wanted in the world. He was on his feet in a moment, kicking off his pants as he walked, and very shortly he had the thin chain and the two nubbed ends in his open palm. Leonard looked at them for a long moment, wetting his lower lip, and then he placed one clamp over his left nipple.

He didn't let it snap onto his nipple, and instead let it ease into place. The gradual increase of pressure to the edge of pain – maybe just trespassing into it – felt delicious, and he felt frazzled nerves soothing into place. The part of his mind that was ever the doctor reminded him about feel-good hormones connected with those particular nerves, but the spectacular rush of arousal he felt quickly shoved the rational thought to the sidelines. He had a hard-on to deal with.

The clamps became a familiar friend over the next few weeks, and though he wasn't using them all the time, his orgasms were better and more satisfying when they squeezed into his flesh. When Leonard finally gave into the idea of joining Starfleet, the only thing that followed him from Georgia were the clamps stored in the deepest part of his satchel. As far as he was concerned, no one else was going to find them, and what he used for his own personal satisfaction was his own business.

He never expected to meet Jim Kirk, but no one ever expects to meet someone who'll completely turn their life around.

Even if the man was a goddamn snoop.

Leonard's status as a mature student got him a single room in the dorms, which he recognized was a blessing. He was easily ten years older than the average first year cadet, and it would be asking too much of his sanity to deal with pubescent bullshit at his age. He was glad the administration realized that, too, because otherwise there'd be hell to pay.

On this particular night, Leonard was so tired he just wanted to lie down and doze for half an hour before he started tackling the homework that'd been climbing to levels he hadn't seen since medical school. He'd taken two steps inside his unit, the door sliding shut behind him, when he realized that there was someone else there.

"Oh, hey, Bones!" Jim Kirk tried not to look guilty and utterly failed, and instead waved from the middle of Leonard's room. "You're home. How's your day been?"

While it was nice to have the question asked, Leonard wasn't in the mood. The best way to deal with Jim, or so Leonard liked to think, was to ignore him. He walked past him into the small kitchen unit, and went to find his secret supply of chocolate stashed in a drawer. If he had to throw Jim out, he needed some blood sugar first.

What he found instead was a half-empty wrapper. Leonard stood staring at his open drawer for a very, very long moment as he contemplated the ways he could murder Jim and hide the body without ever being suspected of wrong-doing. It wasn't a long list, but he also wasn't sure any of them satisfying enough for the wrongdoing.

"Oh, is that your chocolate?" Jim asked, popping his head into the open doorway. "Um, I got hungry waiting for you. It's really good chocolate, by the way."

"Jim." His voice was low and even, and he had the oft-hand thought about how impressive that given his not-so-slowly fraying nerves. "What are you doing in my dorm room?"

"Surely to god you've got your own room?" he demanded, and while he knew that Jim had his own assignment somewhere else in the building, he hadn't been there for the last four nights.

"Well, yeah," Jim said, and smiled widely at him. That was the point when Leonard knew the argument had already been won, and that any resistance he might offer was futile. Jim Kirk had a plan, and that was a force of nature in itself. The best he could do was accept his fate and weather the storm. "I was hoping we can hang out tonight."

"Define 'hang out,'" Leonard said, and snapped off a piece of chocolate. He needed the sugar now, otherwise he wouldn't be able to follow the conversation much longer. "Because right now, my plans involve homework, dinner, sleeping, and possibly taking a hot shower."

"Fair enough, I brought my own work to do," Jim said, "and I think your list should be revised to include sex with yours truly. Too much work makes Bones a very boring boy, not to mention way too stressed out."

Leonard sighed. "Maybe." Even though it was going to be a 'yes' before the night was out, but some token resistance wasn't necessarily a bad thing. "If I get enough work done."

"And I thought we could try out those nipple clamps you've got in your sock drawer," Jim added.

He almost didn't hear Jim the first time, and he was licking the chocolate from his fingers from the second bite he'd taken when he realized what just passed Jim's lips. Leonard turned on him, eyes narrowing. "Excuse me?"

"I, uh, got bored," Jim said.

"So you decided to steal my chocolate *and* go through my stuff?" Leonard snapped. "Good god, Jim, what are you, five? You've got less self-control than my six-year-old."

"I should be disturbed that you're comparing me to your kid," Jim protested.

"Right now, she's a goddamn adult compared to you," Leonard replied, still irked. "Boundaries, Jim, ever heard of them?"

"I know the general theory," Jim quipped, and then sobered a bit. "Okay, I realize I overstepped my bounds a bit, but on the other hand, man, you've been holding back on me."

Leonard felt his cheeks flush. "That's not the goddamn point."

"Okay, that's a good point." Jim hoisted himself up onto the counter top, and it's a sign of how tired Leonard felt that he didn't shove him off. "I'm sorry, I didn't really think about how you'd feel about me peeking around."

That might be a first, and the apology felt good enough for now. In the hopes of distracting Jim from thoughts of what he'd found in his sock drawer, Leonard snapped off a piece of chocolate and slipped it between Jim's generous lips. "Apology accepted, and I do promise to find every single vaccination and immunization humanly possible to stab into you if you do it again."

Jim's eyes twinkled. "I accept your terms." He said it in a way that reminded Leonard of a cat calculating how it might bypass you for the cheese on the table. "Can we talk about the clamps now?"

The blood rushed back, and Leonard had to drop his gaze, moving away to the replicating unit. "No."

"Why not?" Jim asked, and waited for Leonard to get his dinner pulled out -- even though it wasn't much better than a grilled cheese and a few vegetable sticks in the name of something fresh with vitamins. "I mean, sure, we've not been sleeping together all that long, but given all that we've tried, the kink discussion is something we might want to have... considering."

Leonard refused to answer as he ate the sandwich, because the hot cheese took precedence over his embarrassment. He then chewed on a carrot stick, aware of Jim watching him the entire time, and finally he knew he had to say something.

"I own a pair of nipple clamps," he finally said, and hated how red he knew his face was going to get. He could talk to patients about STIs and risky sex without losing face, but he wasn't sure how he'd make it through this conversation.

"So were you going to tell me about them?" Jim asked, kicking his heels a bit.

"Well, I don't know..." Leonard felt more than a little floored by the question, and finally he had to shrug. "That's never really come up in conversation before."

The way Jim's eyes widened was almost comical. "You just... don't use 'em without warning, do you?"

"What?" Leonard paused, trying to parse the concern, and then he suddenly got it. He pointed his celery at Jim. "Wait a second, you think those are for you?"

"You mean they aren't?" Jim asked, and what looked like relief crossed his features before his eyes suddenly crinkled in understanding. "Wait, Bones, you like that?"

Leonard looked at him for a long, measured moment, and bit down on the celery.

"You like that," Jim finally repeated, like it was a revelation, as he reached forward to tug Leonard closer. There wasn't any point in resisting, so Leonard did so while continuing to eat his vegetables. "And you never mentioned this because, why?"

There were a plethora of reasons, but Leonard didn't really want to go into any of them right at the moment. He knew his cheeks were pink enough to look windburnt, but then Jim slipped his hand up his shirt to palm his chest. It felt warm and centring, and Leonard found he didn't mind it.

"No reason in particular," he said, because it was a half-truth. "I guess I thought I'd get around to it eventually."

"Fair enough." Jim pulled him in for a kiss, and it was fond and tender, just what Leonard needed right then. He liked the angle of Jim being slightly higher, making him tilt his face up which wasn't something he was used to, and he put his arms around Jim to anchor him in place. Jim's hands were still on his chest, pinned almost awkwardly. They stayed there until the kiss was over, and then he was back to stroking the skin and his thumbs were brushing over his nipples. Leonard couldn't help the soft moan he made, and he felt Jim smile against his ear, whispering. "I'm going to take your shirt off now."

Leonard nodded, and glanced down to see Jim grasping the hem of his shirt and then pulling it over his head. He went through the motions, lifting his arms up, and after the fabric passed over his head, Leonard had to push his bangs back from his forehead. He saw Jim grinning, a pleased expression on his face as he took Leonard's hands and placed them on the counter on either side of Jim's thighs.

"And now what?" Leonard asked, well aware that his drawl was emerging to colour his words, but not really caring.

Jim hummed and shrugged a bit, trailing his fingers all over Leonard's shoulders and chest. "You know, you've started putting on some muscle since you got here."

"I assume you mean since I got to San Francisco," Leonard said dryly, "because anything else would be physically impossible."

"That's exactly it. You've been eating spinach for dinner and you've suddenly gotten all ripped," Jim countered with a smile, but Leonard doesn't get the reference. Jim could tell, and when he grinned, it was like sunshine. "Just take the compliment, Bones."

"Fine," Leonard sighed. "Thank you."

"Good boy," Jim teased, and now he was concentrating on Leonard's nipples. It felt strangely like a reward, but Leonard found himself too distracted by the way Jim played with him. He stroked the nipples first, and then circled the areola with dampened fingertips. No one's done this to him before, not even Jocelyn, and he loved how it felt. He loved that someone wanted to do this for him. Jim leaned in again, his voice a hushed whisper. "I want you to do something for me."

"Sure." He didn't even care what it was at the moment, as long as Jim kept touching him like that.

There was the soft noise of metal clinking against itself, and Leonard felt Jim pulling on his right hand. Something warm and hard pooled into his palm. Leonard looked down to see his own clamps; Jim must have had them in his pocket. Leonard glanced up at Jim, knowing he had his eyebrow raised, and found an eager look on his face.

"Let me see you use them," Jim said, and it almost sounded like an order.

No, on second thought, that was definitely a command.

Leonard had to swallow, mouth suddenly dry, and he felt hyper-aware of everything happening around him. Jim's gaze felt like a weight on his skin as he watched. Somehow, Leonard's hands are strangely steady – professional training ever in place – as he took one clamp, squeezing it open, and let it bite down on the small, puckered flesh of his nipple.

It wasn't the pain he liked, though that always helped when he felt more aroused. The constant, unrelenting pressure was what he craved, and his eyes drifted shut for a moment as he savoured how it felt. He was hardening in his pants, and he slid his fingers along the chain that connected the two ends, grasping the other clamp. A moment later, he eased that one open, and placed it on his second nipple.

He felt the line of his shoulders ease, and Jim inhaled sharply.

"You really like that," Jim murmured, and now he explored Leonard's chest. His fingers nudged both clamps, and it made Leonard moan softly. He tilted his head forward, forehead coming to lean against Jim's shoulder, but a firm hand on his head pushed him back again. "I've never seen you like this."

"Like what?" Leonard asked, wishing the talking was over.

"This is the first time I've seen you let go," Jim said, and he smiled like a child who's figured something out that's very important and very precious. He tugged on the chain, and it felt like Leonard's knees were about to turn into water. He was hard but he didn't want to touch his cock yet.

"And all I'm hearing is a lot of talk," Leonard shot back.

He knew he was tossing out a challenge, and Jim looked like he was going to rise to the occasion. He slid off the counter, grasping the middle of the chain, and turned around so he could walk backwards toward Leonard's bed. He tugged as he went, the delicious pull drawing Leonard in his wake. It should've been ridiculous, but it might possibly be the most erotic thing Leonard had experienced.

The pressure eased when Jim's legs were up against the bed, and Leonard stopped, watching as Jim quickly took off his pants and then sat down on the bed. He kept watching, knowing what Jim probably had planned, and he found that he didn't really mind. It was more of a game than anything they'd done together so far, and that suited him fine. He waited for Jim to settle on the edge, and spread his legs. A sharper tug than before guided Leonard down to his knees, and then he found himself looking up at Jim again.

"I'm not a horse," he said with just an edge of warning.

Jim's free hand played with Leonard's bangs. "The thought never crossed my mind. Comfortable?"

"I'll live," Leonard said, and then he was drawn further by the chain when Jim tugged sharply. It left a good sting, and he couldn't help the soft moan as he inched forward until Jim's cock looked him right in the face. He glanced up once at Jim, just long enough to see those intensely blue eyes focusing on him, and then leaned in to lick at the head of his cock.

It was a game of tugging and pulling. Leonard kept his hands on Jim's thighs, anchoring himself in place as much as he felt held there by Jim's grip on the chain. He never considered himself a master at giving head, but the chemistry of the situation made him much more willing to show – even prove – that he was capable of pleasing Jim. The idea sounded weird in his head, because it wasn't far from the first time he'd done this, but the premise felt completely new.

There was a rhythm to the way Jim pulled on the chain, with light, almost non-existent tugs followed by sharper ones that felt like punctuation, making Leonard squirm in vaguely growing discomfort and yet he sucked harder. A reward came first as Jim's other hand came to tangle in his hair, stroking in comforting counterpoint to the ever harder pulls that forced him to breathe through the moment, mouth tightly sealed around Jim's cock.

"Oh, damn," Jim suddenly groaned. His hand tensed, pulling Leonard closer, and then he was coming with a satisfied moan. Leonard tried to focus on taking it all in, and he was horny as hell.

Fuck it.

He slipped his hand down into his pants, not caring whether anything dribbled onto his face as he gasped, Jim's cock sliding from his mouth. He pressed his cheek to Jim's knee, jerking himself off, and the tension on the clamps didn't stop until he came with a whimper.

There was a hand brushing through his hair a moment later, and Jim chuckled from above. "Well, that was one of my better ideas."

Leonard groaned, not sure if he could focus on a conversation at the moment. "Is that why you stole my chocolate?"

"I'll buy you more chocolate," Jim said, "if it means we get to do this more often. "

He mumbled grumpily in reply, but it wasn't heartfelt; besides, the promise was enough to mollify him for the moment. Leonard found himself blinking in surprise as Jim guided him upright by the shoulders, leaning in for a kiss before he eased on clamp off at a time. That made Leonard hiss in discomfort. He'd never pulled that hard before, and both nipples were redder than he remembered. But Jim coaxed him to his knees before leaning in to kiss his chest softly.

"There," Jim said, without an ounce of smugness, "all better."

That made Leonard smile, and he didn't stop as Jim helped him to his feet. His legs felt shaky, but with a hand on Jim's shoulder, he managed to take off his pants, wiping himself off before throwing them to the side of the room. He didn't care about the message, he just wanted to lie down, preferably with Jim as his pillow.

They'd just arranged themselves, with Jim pulling the cover over them, when Leonard remembered something he'd wanted to ask about earlier. "So why did you think these were for you?"

He felt Jim shrug beneath him. "Well, I just assumed, and you know what they say about assuming," he joked.

"And you are an ass," Leonard agreed, kissing bare skin to ease any sting.

"So if you like the clamps," Jim said, "would you be up to trying out other things, too?"

That wasn't something he'd ever considered, but with Jim, it didn't sound too daunting. "It's possible."

Jim made a thoughtful noise. "We'll talk about it later, then, but I'm sort of glad I snooped in your drawer."

"I suppose so," Leonard said, not quite able to agree. "But you snoop again, I'll be the pain in your ass."

"I promise," Jim told him. "Besides, I'd rather be the pain in _your ass_ , if you get what I mean."

Leonard definitely did, and he decided he wouldn't mind finding out.

*fin*


End file.
